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Friday, October 6, 2006

Putting Lipstick on the Pig

The following 2 articles appeared in The Wave, Rockaway's community newspaper (since 1893). The first is the bi-weekly School Scope column appearing in the OCt. 6 edition.

The second is a news piece ("Joel Klein Meets the Press") from Joel Klein's press addressing ELA scores and appeared Sept. 29, 2006.

Putting Lipstick on the Pigby Norman Scott

October 6, 2006

In the movie “Boiler Room” shady brokers used the expression “Put lipstick on the pig” when they dressed up lousy stocks to sell to a gullible public. Attending events put on by the NYC Department of Education are all about putting lipstick on the pig (PLOTP).(I wrote about the bright shade of lipstick Chancellor Joel Klein tried to apply to the flat ELA scores at his Sept. 21 press conference in a separate article.)

For the DOE, it is all about spinning the many disasters that have resulted from mayoral control. They have managed to do in 30 years what decentralization could not — unite parents and teachers in an increasing understanding that there must be some major changes when the law giving dictatorial powers to politicians and the corporate non-educators they hire to run the school systems for them sunsets in 2009.

A good illustration of people’s frustration was a letter to the NY Times by John C. Fager, former education columnist for The Daily News and currently a teacher. “The mayor… has lost the support of teachers. He and Chancellor Joel I. Klein do not understand the importance of meaningful parent involvement and have alienated parents as well. Having such a person exercise overwhelming control of the school system without any checks and balances is not desirable or effective. Mayoral control, which I ardently supported, needs to be reformed.”

Fager’s letter was in response to a Times article (“Bloomberg Re-emphasizes School Control”, September 20, 2006) on the Mayor’s visit to LA where the mayor there is trying to emulate Bloomberg by fighting for control of the school system. But he has been partially stymied by a less cooperative teachers union than the UFT, which served up the school system to Bloomberg on a platinum platter.

The article stated, “Mr. Bloomberg has embarked on a high-profile offensive to make mayoral control permanent. At stake, the administration fears, is the long-term fate of his changes to the school system.”

Bloomberg and Klein are afraid that there could be a reversal of their so-called “Children First” reforms when a new mayor comes into power. Actually, they are worried that when they are gone people will unbury the lies and distortions and discover it was really Children Last, Management First as all the shennigans (can anyone spell S-N-A-P-P-L-E) of no-bid contracts, political favors no different than took place under decentralization (but with a new cast of characters) are uncovered. At least in the old days people on the gravy train were community based rather than the high end corporate pilfering going on as wheelbarrows of money are handed over to private firms with influence – the BloomKlein version of “friends with benefits.” I never thought I’d say this, but the pre-BloomKlein system was less harmful to children, parents and teachers.

At his press conference Klein started lobbying to remain as chancellor under a new mayor by talking about the wonderful stability in Boston after having had the same Superintendent for 12 years. Boston topped New York for the Broad (pronounced Brood) prize, supposedly for “an award created to honor urban school districts making the greatest overall improvement in student achievement while at the same time reducing achievement gaps across income and ethnic groups.” In reality, it is a prize for the greatest achievement privatizing as much of public education as possible while undermining the teachers union. It is hard to see how Boston could have topped New York in the latter.

Apparently, BloomKlein were so sure of winning the prize, they trucked all regional superintendents down to the award ceremony, only to end up with just a bit if egg on their faces.

The Times article quoted Bloomberg as saying at a meeting of city commissioners a year ago (my brackets), “We’ve got to find some ways [to put lipstick on the pig] between now and the end of our administration to make it so compelling [more PLOTP] that the public will demand that we continue to put the interest of our students first, and the interest of the people who work in the system or benefit from getting contracts in the system last.”

BloomKlein are putting their interests (let me repeat — Management FIRST instead of Children First) ahead of those of the children. What a joke to talk about those who got contracts in the last system when the BloomKlein regime has made the previous outlay of money to contractors look like small change — but the KGB-like hiding of information by the DOE requires a steam shovel to dig it all up. But when they are gone — it will be “Katie bar the door” time.

The damage to children from the rest of their incompetent schemes; from the one-size-fits-all curriculum (millions of dollars spent on new books by the districts were wasted as these books sit in closets); to the massive amounts spent on PD that so many teachers consider a waste (especially those 2 days before Labor Day); to the spending of $17 million to fix their own incompetent reorganization when just about anyone in the system would tell them what to do for free; to the report that the number of overcrowded classes violating the UFT contract have doubled to over 6000 — now there’s Children First for you. If there were no UFT contract (under such attack by BloomKlein) protecting children from obscene class sizes, they would cram a hundred in a class. Or maybe build more stadiums and have class sizes of 50,000. The BloomKlein administration will need shipping containers of lipstick.

Randi Weingarten’s quote in the same Times article, considering the onslaught against the members of her union, was tepid, at best: “You talk to a student or a parent who’s in one of the new small schools, they’ll tell you that it’s fantastic. You talk to a parent of a special ed student who hasn’t gotten the placement they want, and they’ll tell you it’s terrible. You just have a whole bunch of anecdotes right now.”

With an obvious need to gear up a campaign to stop the Mayor from lobbying a continuance of the disaster known as mayoral control, Weingarten missed another opportunity to call attention to this by taking a neutral position. Why one might ask, considering the fact that for teachers this has been such a catastrophe? Is it that she put so many eggs in the basket by being a major supporter of the mayor's takeover? Or is it her expectation that in the next election the UFT's favorite candidate Bill Thompson will be the new mayor and the UFT can be back in the driver's seat.

The UFT uses a different shade of lipstick

The UFT version of PLOTP is to convince the members of the advantages of the 2005 contract, where the Open Market System and the inability of senior teachers to be given job preference has led to numerous experienced teachers being tossed from their schools and classrooms and turned in substitutes, one of the most horrifying jobs in the school system. While having full-time subs assigned to a school is not a bad idea (that was my job for my first year and a half as a teacher and I learned a lot while doing it) there has never been such a demand from the UFT. Yet, notice the tub of lipstick applied by a 6-figure salaried UFT PR person disguised as a teacher on the UFT blog:

“There is a real educational benefit in having an ATR pool — and a real benefit to teachers too. If you’ve ever worked in a school…where subs were hard to come by, you know how valuable on-site subs can be… the teachers are spared from having to take extra kids…some principals are just fine with breaking up a class, disrupting everybody else’s classes on that grade for the day…nobody ever really liked bumping. Even the senior teacher who did the bumping was often resented in the new school and made to feel unwanted. And of course, some poor new teacher down the line was out of a job. But what choice was there? Now there is a choice. On balance, I think it’s a better deal.”

This lead to a comment from blogger called “Schoolgal”: “After reading the above comments, I can only conclude that this is a sad day for our union. This has to be the worst spin ever, and tasteless at that.”

The UFT can go halfies on a couple of those lipstick containers with the DOE.

Norman Scott can be reached at norscot@aol.com

Joel Klein Meets the Press Sees progress despite flat results

Special To The Wave by Norman Scott, Education EditorSept. 29, 2006

New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein held a press conference at the Tweed Courthouse on September 21 to discuss the results of the just released 2006 English Language Arts (ELA) 4th and 8th grade test scores. While not quite ecstatic, Klein seemed pleased with the results – despite the fact that they showed little or no improvement over last year.

City fourth grade scores dropped slightly, but less than the rest of the state. While Klein attributed this drop to a slightly harder test, he felt it was important that the gains of the previous years had been upheld, a point echoed by UFT President RandI Weingarten who held a brief meeting with the press on the steps of Tweed after Klein’s conference.

In 2005 when there was a big jump in 4th grade scores that occurred throughout the state, Klein and Mayor Bloomberg ignored the gains across the state as the Mayor trumpeted the results in his reelection campaign, attributing the improvement to his educational reforms. Some teachers charged that the test was extremely easy, tailored politically rather than educationally in an election year.

This year, across the grades, there was also a significant jump in NYC of Level Ones, the percent of students at the lowest grade level. That was somewhat surprising since numbers of teachers hired to mark the exams in February complained that many exams they graded as Level Ones were ordered changed to Level Twos after consultation with state officials who created the grading rubric, in essence making the results throughout the system look better than they should have been. “A child practically has to breathe on the paper and we are ordered to give them a Two,” said one teacher. A harder test and an easier rubric could theoretically cancel each other out.

At the press conference, Klein compared the NYC results with the so-called Big 4 cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers as a more apples-to-apples comparison. Last year when the Big 4 showed gains corresponding with NYC last year, Klein did not make such comparisons, claiming it was his reform package that was the difference, not the nature of the test.

The news was somewhat better for the 8th grade scores, though still dismal, as 36.6% of 8th graders scored Level 3 & 4. Klein claimed a rise of 7.1% in 8th grade scores in the four years he has managed the DOE, statistically higher than the rest of the state. The Big 4 rose 4.95 in this same period. Yet as Bob Tobias, former head of testing for DOE, pointed out, the results in 8th grade are only 1.3% higher than seven years ago – when the state first established this exam. Klein attributed the severe drop off in performance with each succeeding grade once children leave elementary school as being a national problem.

State Education Commissioner Richard Mills was quoted in the NY Times: “The overall pattern is disturbing. Literacy is the problem. This pattern is not inevitable. This pattern has to change… We still have a lot of work to do. We have to do something different. We have to change our tactics, our curriculum, our approach.”

One teacher had a different take. “They want to make is seem that scores stop dropping after the 4th grade because of the curriculum or teacher quality as a substitute for funding education anywhere near the range of the wealthy suburbs or exclusive private schools. Class sizes are often kept low to assure better scores in a scrutinized grade and allowed to rise after that. So much time is spend practicing for the test instead of actually learning to read in a meaningful way, which leads to artificially pumped up scores, much like a weight lifter pumping up a bicep for a competition. When the level of intensity is reduced in the 5th and 6th grades because they do not get as much focus as the 4th grade, the ‘muscle’ goes down as they revert to their ‘true’ reading level.”

Some teachers feel that a truer measure would be to track individual children from the 4th to the 8th grade over the years as a method of getting valid information that could be useful for them. They point to the fact that a certain number of children held over actually take 5 or more years to go from the 4th to the 8th grade and this has an impact on scores, usually skewing them upward.

Both Randi Weingarten and Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters also disagreed with Mills and Klein, saying that there is a correlation with rising class sizes after 4th grade and worse performance, a point that Klein and Mills totally ignored.

As average class sizes in NYC rise dramatically in grades 5 and up, the percent of students scoring at grade level drops —

Class sizes in NYC, particularly in 7th and 8th grades, have not fallen significantly in seven years according to Haimson. But the averages tell only part of the story. “According to an analysis from the Independent Budget Office a few years ago,” Haimson said, “60% of middle school students remained in classes larger than 28, with nearly half of them in classes larger than 30. The Bloomberg administration continues to tinker at the edges by creating K-8th or 6-12th schools. But as long as our middle school students continue to be deprived of the individual support they need because of their class sizes, we will not see major improvements in these grades.”

2 comments:

Are you talking about the UFT or generally? I can only talk about the UFT. It has been charged over the years with retarding real reform, though the use of the word "real" means different things to different people. After all, BloomKlein claims to have totally reformed the system but I view what they did as overturning the structure and replaced it with a superstructure. Not reform.

Real reform to me always focused on teacher control over basic educational processes. I would set up teams of teachers and give them total responsibility for educating a bunch of kids over a period of time (years) in any way that they see fit. I would make sure there was not a strict number based on class size but at least one extra person or more who either coordinate or rotate with the others. A real learning community. Provide social workers and guidance to the teams. After school support for the kids, etc. It would cost money but why not try an experiment in a couple of places?

But getting the union on board to any plan that empowers teachers seems doomed. I really believe that the leadership doesn't trust rank and file teachers. There's probably lost more ideas. Any of your own?

Comments are welcome. Irrelevant and abusive comments will be deleted, as will all commercial links. Comment moderation is on, so if your comment does not appear it is because I have not been at my computer (I do not do cell phone moderating).

UFT Election Vote Comparison: 2004-10

A Personal Historical Perspective

Why Karen Lewis Reads Ed Notes

"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

7 weeks Old - Nov. 2011

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Hedges says, There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history.

Premiere "Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman"

Class Bias, Class Size and Online Learning

Good Article on Value-Added

Interesting commentary on Bloomberg Model

"The Bloomberg model has positioned parents as customers, and principals as CEOs, with student outcomes as the product. But the backlash that the mayor has faced is from parents who don't see their schools that way. Test scores aren't always what parents care most about in a school. Many care just as much about having teachers they can connect with, places they and their children feel comfortable and respected, a school's history in the community—things that aren't quantifiable o a standardized exam."

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

GEM's Julie Cavanagh Debates E4E member on NY1 on LIFO and Seniority

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy TysonProfessor of African American Studies and HistoryDuke University

A Familiar Voice on Unions

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike"- Adolf Hitler, May 2, 1933

Leonie Haimson on MSNBC

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Outsource our children

Harlem $ucce$$ Academy Ad

Weingarten Sellout Tour Continues

With the myriad of anti-teacher crap pervading the headlines, AFT President Randi Weingarten thinks it's a good time to discuss faster ways to fire us.

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

Why did Waiting for Superman get snubbed and Exit Through the Gift Shop get nommed?

Davis Guggenheim’s doc about poor kids and charter schools got 11 major film award nominations and won four, including the National Board of Review and Sundance Audience Prize. Most pundits thought it a shoo-in. He won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, and had major help from Bill Gates, Oprah and Obama. Some fear prankster Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop is all a hoax.

Why it happened: Guggenheim’s big backers may have actually irked independent-minded Academy members. Worse, his teacher’s union-bashing film was embraced by conservatives, one of whom said his Oscar snub is “the price a political apostate pays in Hollywood for straying off the liberal plantation.” Education expert Diane Ravitch trashed it as inaccurate. A more dispassionate expert says, “The first response to the movie was that it’s about poor black kids, and it’s from the Gore guy, so it must be liberal and good-hearted. And then Ravitch and others portrayed it as basically right-wing propaganda, which unsettled the liberal members of the Academy. I don’t think the movie is as reactionary as Ravitch portrayed it, but I also don’t think it’s very good.” An Oscar doc voter agrees. “It was a great deal of hype. I felt like I’d seen the story before.” “It also tanked at the box office, relative to what was spent on promoting it,” adds the education expert. “The true unforgivable sin in Hollywood!”

Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping by Norm Scott

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

From Sharon Higgins

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

Norm on the radio at "The Mind of a Bronx Teacher"

I was asked to cover for a guest too chicken to appear by Bronx Teacher on his penetrating weekly internet radio show (every Tuesday night at 9pm).

"The union has consistently been giving back since 1968."

He asked some great questions and I had a chance to get into issues in terms of historical context of the UFT - the '68 strike, the '75 massive cuts to schools and other issues to help prove my point that Randi Weingarten DID NOT CHANGE DIRECTION but continued and amplified the policies set in motion by Al Shanker.

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

An Oldie But Goodie: The Disparity Gap

Charter Schools and Tracking

Thanks for getting this posting some of the air it deserves, Norm.I think ceolaf is right about a great number of things, and particularly appreciate his systemic, meta-view of these hot button issues.

I want to substantiate a few of the points raised in this post:

1. "Charterness" is not a condition for school innovation.

Just as the reverse is not true(a a charter school is by definition innovative), public schools that are NOT charters can be innovative.The original small schools movement of the late 80's and early 90's (now coopted and transformed by Gates/DoE)spawned a number of pedagogically innovative schools.In District One, educators, administrators and community members started a handful of still popular and sucessful small schools within schools to pull back the fleeing local residents into public schools.Those Dewey-based, child-centered schools offered curriculae based on whole language, constructivist math, mixed age groupings, integrated curriuculum projects and portfolio evaluation

2. Tracking on a large scale does indeed exist.Gifted and Talented and CTT programs are used as sorting hats that are increasing racial isolation in many schools and communities.I would like to be able to substantiate this trend in the latest round of admissions, but as usual, have no access to that data from DoE yet (believe me I try)!

3. Special Ed service availability is, as ceolaf suspects, one more way to segregate and track:The two (soon to be 3) charter schools serving the District One community offer NO CTT or self contained classes.The "other public" district schools operate with plenty of both (w/ the exception of a few elite schools- a citywide K-12th G and T , a "dual language" Manadarin pre-k through 8th grade program and an elite selective HS), yet the charters offer no more than SETTS services to students.Despite the rhetoric of least restrictive environments and innovative methods for servicing students with special needs that you may hear from the OCS patricians, parents with kids with IEPs that require more services or more restrictive environments know that they need not apply to these schools.

Video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model

Great Post on Teacher Quality at the Morton School

I'm very tired of the myth that schools are bursting at the seams with apathetic, unskilled, surly, child-hating losers who can't get jobs doing anything else. I recently figured that, counting high school and college where one encounters many teachers in the course of a year, I had well over 100 teachers in my lifetime, and I can only say that one or two truly had no place being in a classroom.